Is your drone Turing complete?

Dated:

What if this ransomware business, which is going on again on a global scale today, is used in connection with moving things, as opposed to "merely" stationary computers?

Don't know about you but I'm thinking about drones, self-driving cars, and smart phones that blow up (e.g. due to ill-designed batteries).

As Edsger Dijkstra said in an interview in the late 1980s: some things are simply *not makeable.* It would be great to hear computer professionals express similar concerns today with regard to our Internet of (Moving) Things. These reservations could perhaps be taken as a sign of a discipline coming of age, not unlike the laws of thermodynamics.

Also in the news today: Britain's newest warship runs Swiss Cheese OS. This story is of course no surprise to specialists in the field; similar complaints can be made about nuke submarines and other military systems (including one that I was fortunate enough to have a look at as a safety engineer).

Like the Laws of Thermodynamics

Law 1: Every digital system deployed today contains bugs.

For a confirmation, see some youtube videos from Nancy Leveson. This includes digital systems deployed in outer space, i.e. systems that have been designed as carefully as possible.

Law 2: Every digital system deployed today has security vulnerabilities.

Implication: avoid connecting devices if safety is your sole measure of success (which is of course not the case in practice).

Question: What about the systems that we will design and implement tomorrow?

For some answers: see my latest book Turing Tales and the many references in my book.

Some Quotes from History

Due to lack of time, I will just provide some peculiar quotes that I have gathered in the past months:

"A computer program can be regarded as a complicated mathematical and logical function, and the running of the program is equivalent to applying the function with the given data as arguments." — Christopher Strachey in 1964

"I am delighted to find that some useful theorems are at last emerging in the field on programming language theory." — Christopher Strachey in 1971

"In my own personal view the whole subject of computing is intellectually at a pretty low level and it has no real right to call itself a science yet." — Christopher Strachey in 1975

"We are captured by a historic tradition that sees programs as mathematical functions and programming as the central practice for translating these functions into working systems." — Peter J. Denning in 2004

"We are becoming captured by a tradition that only sees programs as partially computable functions, thereby ignoring several Turing INcomplete languages, in the name of the Halting Problem and so-called scientific progress." — Edgar G. Daylight in 2017